What are the benefits of email marketing?

For the uninitiated, the benefits of email marketing may not be immediately clear. In fact, even seasoned marketing pros may not immediately be able to identify the many advantages of email marketing over other marketing methods.

There are many reasons why we believe – and know – that email marketing is one of, if not the best performing marketing channels that is available out there, to every single brand and business on the planet.

Everyone you email already knows your brand or business

In order to contact someone and market to them via email, you need their express permission – this makes email the strongest tool in your marketing toolbox.

Everyone who receives your emails will have already purchased from you, or shown interest in your brand or business. Whether you’re an online ecommerce retailer that they’ve purchased goods from before, or a SaaS provider whose service or content they’ve interacted with and shown interest in, you should already have an existing relationship with them.

Of course, there are still some brands and businesses out there who don’t play by these rules, but GDPR means that everyone should be getting permission from everyone before the send them any marketing emails. Not only that, increasingly smarter inbox filtering means that fewer spam messages now make it to the inbox, instead being sent straight to the spam folder.

Now, email marketers who choose to ignore best practice advice or new rules will see their deliverability suffer, while those who abide by the rules and respect their subscribers will make it to the inbox.

What this means is that consumers can expect fewer irrelevant marketing messages, and brands and businesses can hopefully expect their marketing lists to be engaged with their content, because subscribers have said that they want to receive emails from them.

It’s easy to use

There was a time when you needed to have a solid understanding of HTML and CSS to build email templates, but those days are long behind us now.

While there’s still a thriving community of email designers and coders, who are pushing the envelope in terms of what email can do and look like, modern marketing platforms and services have given everyday marketers the tools to build and send email campaigns, quickly and easily.

These visual, drag-and-drop style editors make the turnaround time of a campaign much quicker than it used to be. It also gives smaller businesses and one-person marketing teams the ability to enter the email game.

And although it’s easy to use, email can be hard to master. Once you start using it, you’ll soon learn that the smarter you are with your email campaigns, the better your results become. The next step is one of the easiest and simplest ways that you can benefit from smarter email marketing.

Segmentation drives relevancy, which generates engagement

Relevancy is key with email marketing. The average consumer now receives over 100 marketing emails every week (DMA Marketer email tracker 2018), and with attention spans waning, you need to make sure your emails are cutting through the noise of the modern-day inbox.

This is where segmentation of your audience comes in. The ‘batch and blast’ method no longer works. You need to make sure that the emails you’re sending are useful and relevant to the recipient. So, by segmenting your email lists, and sending campaigns that are targeted to these segments, you’ll see better results.

Many people act on impulse

Impulse buyers have long been swayed into purchases by other forms of marketing, and email is no different.

By adding clear calls-to-action in your emails, you increase the chances of the recipient clicking through to your website and completing a sale. The easier you make it for the customer to buy something, the likelier they are to complete an order.

What’s more, if you’re segmenting your lists and sending targeted communications and campaigns, then the chances of generating a purchase from your email increase even more!

The possibilities are endless

You can do anything with your email marketing. While most email marketing campaigns are intended to sell, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

One of the real benefits of using email marketing in your strategy is that you can use it to build and strengthen relationships with subscribers and customers.

From the moment someone signs up to your email list, and you (hopefully) send them a welcome email, there are endless possibilities for the types of email campaigns that you can send them. Think abandoned cart, browse, winback and loyalty.

This spans the full customer lifecycle – from acquisition to conversion, right through to retention and even advocacy, you can utilize email for the full journey.

You can accurately measure your success

One of the real advantages of using email marketing is that on most, if not all modern platforms, you can easily report on and measure the results of your email campaigns.

This makes it easy to see what’s working and what isn’t, and it also makes it a lot easier to highlight success and results for other areas of your business. If you’re having trouble getting buy-in to the importance of email marketing in your wider marketing strategy, then being able to produce accurate results is certainly one way of proving the importance of email.

Easy to use on a global scale

While most global marketing campaigns will be subject to subtle differences that make their execution difficult across different continents, email is – for the most part – exempt from this.

There will be the obvious challenges – different time zones, languages, and currencies will likely be the ones that crop up most – but, the real benefit of using email is that you can use it on a global scale with the minimum of fuss.

This is especially useful for brands and businesses looking to expand into different territories. In lieu of a physical store or office, email is a good starting point, even if it’s just to test the waters of international markets.

Scalable

Carrying on from the previous benefit of being useful on a global scale, email marketing is also scalable. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve got an email list of 1,000, or 10 million, you can still make email work in your marketing strategy.

The best advantage of using email is that your email marketing strategy can scale with the growth of your business. There are solutions out there for smaller businesses and startups, right the way up to enterprise, as well as omnichannel solutions for the large, multinational brands and businesses who have successfully built up a large global presence.

It doesn’t have to cost the earth

This goes hand-in-hand with the scalability of email marketing. Your use of email doesn’t have to cost more than you can afford. If you’re a small business or organization just starting on your email marketing journey, then there are several free or low-cost email marketing solutions available on the market which will be more than suitable for your needs.

When your email marketing strategy begins to grow along with your subscriber and customer lists, then there will always be appropriate email marketing software providers out there for you.

We know that dotmailer is a perfect example of this. Our platform is tailored for serious marketers who are well-versed in their email marketing strategy, and need the appropriate level of software features and strategic account management.

ROI

In fact, ROI from email marketing has consistently outperformed other channels.

If you’re not already using email marketing, it’s easy to start. If it’s already part of your wider marketing strategy, you can use some of the tactics detailed above to gain an advantage over your competitors.